Mariela Castro, the daughter of Cuban President Raúl Castro, will be in California this week. Traveling on a US visa to attend a conference of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), she appears to have made it through the same State Department review that denied visas to eleven seemingly less contentious scholars hoping to join the same conference. Some of those turned down are prominent Cubans who have been allowed US visas in the past, including Rafael Hernández, the editor of the Cuban intellectual journal Temas, who has taught at both Harvard and Columbia universities.